There was steady rain on a grey Sunday this weekend and the NFL Championship games were being played. However, neither of these things prevented a full house from amassing inside the Apollo theater to attend a presentation hosted by Brian Lehrer of WNYC and Melissa Harris-Perry called "Hear Our Voices, Count Our Votes." Lehrer told the audience that in the 13 years he's been hosting annual MLK events the atmosphere this year was the most charged he's seen it.
It was a fine and edifying afternoon spent celebrating many amazing civil rights activists. There were interviews, panel discussions, films, poetry, and music. We heard moving tributes to Maya Angelou and lesser known activists such as actress/playwright/poet Ruby Dee and Yuri Kochiyama, listened to Congressmen Charles Rangel recount going to Selma and the realities of the Civil Rights movement then and now, and heard from BlackLivesMatter activists. The last of the three Selma marches was accompanied by the National Guard and lasted for over 50 miles, in which the protesters slept on the sides of roads, endured rain and mud, open hostility and death threats.
Yet, as I sat there comfortable, dry and warm inside this grand theater built in 1934 I found my mind wandering, contemplating the great sacrifice of Martin Luther King's extraordinary lifelong commitment, and challenging myself how I too could be of service. He called out corrupt systems of power, a Democratic president, an economic system that favored the few over the many, a bloated-budgeted and destructive military, an unjust legal and penal system. And he did it by both speaking in hallowed halls and marching with maligned communities.
How many miles did King march in his lifetime? How much hostility, beatings, humiliations, arrests and death threats did he endure every day, each time he went to the head of and led yet another march? How much anxiety, pain, and fear did he and every single brave person who joined him suffer through. I remember hearing somewhere that his autopsy revealed that he had the heart of an old man though he was still in his thirties. His was deep personal sacrifice. Sure, there was plenty of joy and solidarity too. John Lewis referred to those protest marches as "love in action." Rabbi Heschel said he felt like his feet were praying as he walked on the marches, from the African proverb that "when you pray, move your feet."
I hoped that the large crowd at the Apollo would be an indication of the many people who were going to come out to attend the marches planned around the country on the holiday the next day to reclaim his radical legacy. With the #BlackLivesMatter movement capturing the world's attention, marching against police brutality, low wages, the prison industrial complex and the injustices of economic inequality would be the perfect way to honor the more radical and essential King.
If every person who claimed to admire him, or are quick to venerate or re-interpret his legacy for their own purpose, were to have shown up to march - which was the potent and core tactic he used often - it would have been not only an appropriate tribute but the kind of powerful force, blossoming forth as it does from empathy, compassion and righteousness, that King hoped would someday be a living display of the transformational change he was seeking, as well as a condemnation of the death grip of inert status quo preventing it. Praying with one's feet. Another world is possible.
Folks showed up yesterday, though perhaps not as many as expected (at least to this eye, in which maybe a few thousand came out in Harlem, whereas the #MillionsMarchNYC was in the tens of thousands). By rights it should have been millions. Many who took to the streets had evidently done so to heed King's revolutionary call. They've heard, recognized and assimilated his message from five decades ago warning of and calling for resistance to the triple evils of racism, capitalism and militarism. They honored him in public yesterday.
They will sustain the protests.
We will sustain the protests.
"Love in action" is powerful. At some point massive civil disobedience and boycotts have to be considered too.
Here are a few roundups of the day's events:
Huffington Post: "#ReclaimMLK: Activists Nationwide Follow In MLK's Footsteps To Protest Racial Injustice"
Vice: "Every Generation Must Reappropriate the Lessons of the Past': Protesters Reclaim MLK Day In Rallies Across US"
Mic: "#ReclaimMLK Reminds Us of Martin Luther King Jr.'s Real Legacy We Should All Remember"
Reader Supported News: "#Reclaim MLK: It's Not a Few Bad Apples, It's the Tree"
And a Twitter pictorial of yesterday's #ReclaimMLK day's events...